The subject of this thesis is the UK rural touring theatre sector, and the possibility of formal innovation for rural touring. My research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their Collaborative Doctoral Awards scheme, and has come about as a result of a partnership between The University of Nottingham and New Perspectives Theatre Company, which has enabled a combination of theoretical and practice-based research. In the rural touring sector, companies like New Perspectives tour productions to village halls and other community venues, where work is programmed by volunteer promoters. This area of the UK theatre ecology is thriving, but overlooked in academic studies of theatre. I argue that rural touring is distinct from theatre taking place in non-rural contexts in its audiences, places of performance and distribution model. Audience members tend to know each other, and their reasons for attendance often include a wish to socialise with fellow members of their community instead of, or as well as, a desire for a particular artistic experience. Rural touring venues are usually multi-purpose community spaces, used for exercise classes and social groups alongside their use as performance venues. Staff at regional touring schemes act as intermediaries in the distribution model, brokering the booking process between companies and promoters, whose programming choices may be governed by their role as members of the audience community. This thesis expands on scholarship related to theatre audiences and places of performance by highlighting these differences and their implications. The practice-based aspect of my research focuses on the possibility of formal innovation for rural touring, in particular interactive and site-specific work, thus contributing to both scholarship and practice in these areas. Through an examination of existing theory and practice of interactivity, alongside a discussion of New Perspectives’ reasons for investigating interactive work, I lay the groundwork for a practical research project exploring interactivity for rural touring. My approach is informed by Gareth White’s frameworks for analysing audience participation and in particular his proposal of an ‘horizon of participation’ and an ‘horizon of risk’. Something Blue, a pilot performance I created for a rural audience, revealed a specific rural horizon of risk, shaped by the fact that rural audience members tend to know each other, and that their willingness to interact is governed by their perception of the risk of the loss of social capital. My second practical research project explored site-specificity. My examination of existing theory and practice in this area reveals a lack of attention paid to the existing relationship an audience has to the place where a performance occurs. This is a significant factor in rural touring where audiences are drawn from communities of location. I draw on theories of place from geographers including Doreen Massey and Gillian Rose in order to propose an ‘horizon of place’ as a framework for understanding an audience member’s prior experience and knowledge of place. Building on this framework and considering New Perspectives’ reasons for exploring site-specific work, I set out the intentions of my second pilot performance. This performance, Homing, tested ways of engaging with place in a rural touring context. The results of this second pilot revealed a significant difference between the rural audiences’ insider horizons of place, and the company’s outsider horizon of place. My research demonstrated that this difference needs to be taken into account when creating place-related work for rural touring. Alongside my two pilot performances, I discuss interviews I conducted with several practitioners working in the rural touring sector. In my final chapter I consider current changes to the wider sector and potential future models for rural touring. My study reveals rural touring as a thriving and ambitious component of the UK theatre industry, and one deserving of scholarly attention.

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A minha pesquisa debruça-se sobre as produções musicais e as performances de António Variações em Portugal e de José Pérez Ocaña em Espanha. Primeiramente, desenvolverei uma análise crítica sobre a sexualidade, o género e as construções binárias da masculinidade e da feminilidade. Explorarei como os atos sexuais entre pessoas do mesmo sexo começaram a ser legislados e medicalizados pelas sociedades ocidentais e de que maneiras é que a (homos)sexualidade foi sucumbida ao bas-fonds pelos regimes ditatoriais. Neste estudo oferecerei uma leitura atenta das criações culturais de Variações e de Ocaña. Para apoiar a análise textual, musical e visual das representações culturais selecionadas, a teoria queer será adoptada como modelo teórico. Os principais conceitos postulados e estabelecidos por Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, entre outros, serão aplicados às produções culturais para permitir uma deconstrução queer dos textos, das performances e das relações com o contexto histórico, social e cultural de Portugal e de Espanha. Para além deste objectivo geral, o principal objectivo desta pesquisa é demonstrar a importância que António Variações e José Perez Ocaña tiveram na construção de uma cultura queer nestes países, uma vez que ambos os países haviam sido “dominados” durante décadas pelos regimes ditatoriais Salazarista e Franquista. Estes regimes defendiam a ideia de que a homossexualidade era uma “perversão” e como tal, esta teria que ser ser exterminada, de maneira a não pôr em causa os bons valores e a moralidade destas nações. Portanto, o objectivo principal desta tese será a análise das performances destes artistas em contraponto às representações dominantes de género estabelecidos por estes dois regimes ditatorias e as razões que levaram a estes artistas a usarem a música e as performances para expressarem género não-normativo e identidades sexuais. Ao analisar estes períodos poderemos observar os motivos pelos os quais a cultura queer era inexistente, ou mais problematicamente, invisível.

This study explores how British children make sense of traditional Chinese stories through participatory drama, by means of physical and verbal responses. The author conducted her fieldwork through teaching identical drama schemes within two demographically and ethnically distinctive primary schools. The key underpinning methodological approach within the study is ethnographic case studies. The field work lasted one term in each school, with between 13 to 15 hours of teaching time per group. The methods for collecting data included the pre-questionnaire and interviews with children, as well as the following: drama conventions such as forum theatre and still images, visual and image evidence captured by video camera and photography, children’s writing and drawing, a post-evaluation sheet, interviews with teachers, participant observations and field notes. The analysis of qualitative data is presented in two interwoven threads. One thread follows the logic of the ethnographic approach to present the findings of each scheme of work in both schools, in chronological order. The other thread is a thematic analysis, based on grounded theory. These methods may be seen to be integral and complementary to one another. In essence, the author suggests that drama education is a practical model for the pursuit of cosmopolitan education within the modern globalised world. Some limitations and constraints in the research are nonetheless discussed, and pertinent alternatives and improvements are presented. Suggestions for future researchers who wish to conduct similar research projects are provided, and the potential for this research to be extended on a larger scale is indicated.

This research project focuses on the body and examines drama/theatre education as a site where politics and aesthetics can be brought together to promote democracy. Specifically, I explore the possibility of forming a way of doing within drama/theatre educational contexts that might influence a way of coming to understand - and potentially in its turn - a way of being. I am especially concerned with democracy as a living practice and I investigate whether students, through an aesthetic communicative nexus that they are encouraged to form within the drama class, and through their artistic actions within that nexus, can explore the possibilities of being ‘political bodies’, meaning the extent to which this allows democratic possibilities to flourish. I see democracy as conditioned by aesthetics and I focus on the power of the aesthetic to distance us from our ordinariness and everydayness and qualify us with a sensibility with which to reflect and think on our ideas and actions. I seek to promote the idea of a democratic culture and the formation of the democratic self that can create and sustain a culture of democracy. In terms of methodology, this project follows action research and an artsinfused methodology. Four groups participated in this research project. The analysis of the data collected from the fieldwork provides information to illustrate the beginnings of a pedagogy that aims to put these ideas into practice.

Unlike most Asian nations to which Shakespeare was imported with the colonizers during the mid-1800s to impose Western literary culture on the colonized, in the case of Thailand, it is the other way round. Thailand (or Siam as it was called then) managed to escape colonization by Western powers, but during this politically unstable period, Siam felt the urgent need to westernize the country. A period of intensive westernization thus began. Shakespeare arrived as one of several significant elements of the nation’s self-westernization in literary education. In 1916, the name of Shakespeare became widely known in Siam as one of his plays, The Merchant of Venice, was translated by King Vajiravudh (1881-1925), who is highly regarded as a prolific dramatist and all-around man of letters in the country. The King himself initiated Western literary translation by translating three plays by Shakespeare, namely The Merchant of Venice (1916), As You Like It (1921), and Romeo and Juliet (1922), and also by adapting Shakespeare’s Othello (1925) into a Siamese conventional dance drama playtext. Although there were some other attempts before and after the King to translate Shakespeare, none of them has been successful in leaving a memorable impact in Thai literary circles as much as the King’s version. Translating and staging Shakespeare’s works in Thailand became rare, practised only within a small circle of literary scholars. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, there have been a handful of attempts to translate and stage Shakespearean plays by commercial Thai theatre practitioners. To stage Shakespeare’s plays in Thailand especially in a contemporary context, most production teams have encountered a similar difficulty, that of bridging the gap to bring Shakespeare to Thai popular audiences who embrace different backgrounds in dramatic practice and aesthetics. The main purposes of this study are, therefore, to examine how Shakespeare has been translated, staged, and received by Thai readers and audiences from the late nineteenth century when Shakespeare was introduced in Siam until today, and to locate his influences and impact on Thai literary and theatrical culture. This study is designed to shed light on the history of Thai translations of Shakespeare and also to provide an analysis of the translation strategies adopted by early Thai translators to domesticate Shakespeare into the Thai context. So the thesis examines the process of text appropriation and domestication adopted by Thai translators and theatre practitioners to make Shakespeare accessible to Thai readers and popular audiences. The use of Shakespeare’s plots and allusions to Shakespeare’s plays in contemporary Thai television soap operas is also another main focus of the study. This study also suggests that the domestication process applied to Shakespeare both in translation and in staging is influenced by the changes in the social, political and aesthetic contexts of each different period; furthermore, the process of domestication obviously becomes less problematic the further the country moves towards westernization.

This research aimed to explore the perceptions of students and teachers involved in school plays in secondary schools. The main aims of the study were to investigate teachers’ and students' motivation to participate and to explore their perceptions regarding the potential benefits, challenges and positive and negative impacts of involvement in this activity. Given the limited amount of research investigating this area, literature relating to the arts in education, drama and theatre in education, youth theatre groups and extra-curricular activities have been included in the rationale for studying this area. The study employed a two-phase mixed methodology design, which involved an initial phase of questionnaires completed by students and teachers. This was followed by focus groups with the students and semi-structured interviews with the teachers involved. Results indicate that intrinsic enjoyment of the activity was one of the key motivators for student participants. A number of perceived positive impacts and benefits in relation to the students’ personal and social development were identified, along with a number of perceived challenges and negative impacts in relation to the process. The findings are discussed in relation to relevant psychological theories and the practical implications for the field of Educational Psychology.

Thomas Middleton’s work as a playwright and pamphleteer was highly collaborative: from 1601 to 1627 he wrote with at least ten of his contemporaries including Dekker, Jonson and Shakespeare. However, Middleton’s texts are even more collaborative than these writing partnerships would suggest. This thesis defines collaboration as the act of sharing in the process of making meaning, and so proposes that Middleton’s collaborators included not only his many co-writers but also performers, printers and editors. Middleton’s partnership with Thomas Dekker, the three plays and two pamphlets they co-wrote together, are the starting point from which I explore early modern collaboration. Since these texts have survived only in print form, the best information available about the creative processes that generated them is archival sources and the evidence provided by attribution studies. Yet there are two potential problems with the use of attribution evidence. First, because attribution involves assigning parts of texts to writers, it can imply that co-written texts were always singly authored in separate sections then pieced together. Secondly, attribution’s concern with tracking the presence of authors can suggest that non-authorial contributions to a text are not worthwhile. This thesis challenges both of these assumptions. To resolve the tension between valuable evidence provided by attribution studies and their misrepresentation (as I see it) of collaboration, this thesis takes as its starting point those poststructuralist theories which call for a decentred conception of the author. Co-writing can then be understood as an essential aspect of how meaning in a text is made but not the only significant aspect. My thesis reframes attribution evidence in light of this idea and uses it to gain insight into how and why Middleton and Dekker wrote together, rather than to discover ‘who wrote what’. I argue that Middleton began writing with the more experienced Dekker to hone his craft and that their process changed as Middleton became more practised. Taking this approach to attribution scholarship means that I can investigate co-writing without devaluing non-authorial collaboration: Middleton and Dekker’s co-writing is presented alongside the collaborative acts of those who performed, printed and edited their texts. By applying the idea of a decentred author to attribution evidence, this thesis offers an original way to approach early modern collaboration: one which analyses co-writing whilst recognising it as part of a larger network of collaborative acts.

This thesis examines the performance history of Shakespeare focusing on those productions performed as a period analogue of the nineteen-thirties. It engages with the material in two ways. It first attempts to locate influences that have led to the development of this style of performance, finding correlations with both theatrical and televisual drama. It then examines the productions as performed, focusing on the construction of scenography and actor performances. Throughout the analysis, this thesis engages with shifts in the representation of the historical past on both stage and screen.